Azeem Azhar

Get it out there, get it used, an acknowledgement that there's going to be job losses and labor market ructions, but a willingness to push past that.

And perhaps that type of techno-accelerationism can occur in a society with the political controls that China has.

And to your point, the politics, if not the permitting for power,

might slow things down in the US or other parts of the West.

I love the way you describe that as systems' ability to deal with the speed of change, because that, of course, absolutely allows us to say there's an American system and a British one and a Chinese one, and they all face challenges when change is accelerated rapidly, and that gets expressed in different ways and their control mechanisms are different.

but it's still a deep, deep problem.

Now, earlier today, actually, while I was prepping to talk to you, I read this great essay by Kaiser Quo.

I don't know if you've seen it in the last day or two.

This is relevant for the question of systems.

So he's an analyst.

He's a podcaster as well.

In a summary, he says China has become a principal architect of modernity, perhaps even the principal architect of it.

So Western states need to replace a denial of that with an honest assessment and learn from China's performance legitimacy.

And he says that what's happening now, and you touched on this with the Biden administration, this notion that legitimacy came from procedure.

And Kuo argues that legitimacy is actually moving from procedure to performance and that the Chinese track record of the last 30 years is really about that performance.

And given what's happening with the build-out of solar and high-speed rail and other things, it might continue for a little bit longer.

But there is a deeper question there, which is how well can anyone ever understand it?

And, you know, it's famously a difficult system to get your head around.

And there's lots of misperception.

I went to Tianjin and to China for the first time in many years.